Bobby Cruise on Positive Feedback in ROH: It Made Me Feel Gratified

Bobby Cruise was delighted by the feedback that he had received.

The nearly twenty-year Ring of Honor veteran Bobby Cruise in a new interview with Fightful, said that the feedback he received was important. It would eventually help him get involved with the Women’s division. 

Cruise said that the Sinclair Broadcasting Group would let the team do almost whatever they wanted to within the division after getting the opportunity to change things for the Women’s division.

Well, it’s obviously good to hear the feedback, not only from the talent—which is, of course, very important, the people you’re dealing with from show to show, event to event—but also the fan feedback. It made me feel gratified because I asked about being involved in the women’s division for Ring of Honor for quite a while. But, to be quite honest, it also made me feel pretty pissed off because they went in other directions. It didn’t go well, obviously.

The women’s division under Sinclair Broadcasting Group with Ring of Honor [didn’t have a] good reputation. Let’s not sugarcoat it for a number of reasons. I get pissed off about it if I think about it for ten seconds, but other than that, I’m good. It’s fine. The gratification of we were given the ball; we ran with the ball, our team ran with the ball and scored touchdown after touchdown and did very well. I don’t think we could have asked for it to go any better.

There is one thing I will say about our time with Ring of Honor under Sinclair is we were pretty much allowed to do whatever we wanted to in the division. There was very few times that we were told, ‘No,’ whether it was budgetary constraints or anything like that. One was, ironically enough, Mercedes Martinez. We wanted to bring her in at the Death Before Dishonor pay-per- view, and we were told we could not because of a budget thing. Now she is, of course, Ring of Honor Women’s World Champion. So it’s funny how things work out.

It’s gratifying. Maria’s probably tired of me saying this story and telling people this story, but being in Ring of Honor for seventeen / eighteen years, you get close to your friends who’ve been there not that long, but just as long as far as tenure and so forth, and they would get sick of me raving about the women’s division. Because I think Ring of Honor’s women’s division in 2021 was only one of the best couple of things in Ring of Honor itself in 2021. 

I think Jonathan Gresham being recognized as the superstar he is, and Josh Woods break out, the Briscoe’s continued dominance, the reuniting of the Kingdom, so you can list off four or five things. But the women’s division is definitely in there. It’s probably in the top two or three. Some people would say, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta stop talking about the women’s division. We get it; we get it.’ But I was just proud of what the division was accomplishing.

Bobby Cruise was the ring announcer for the “Winner Takes All” ROH and IWGP Tag-Team Championship match at the AEW and New Japan Pro Wrestling co-branded PPV Forbidden Door. Fightful provided live coverage for the event, and the results can be seen here.